Jones' Swift Has The Wettest Towel Among Metro's Coaches

Sports - A teary time

Will Carlton said he wouldn't lie, that Apopka had the potential to be pretty good. Jerry Buchert identified his second-year University High team as the ''Dirty Two Dozen.''

Tim Smith, West Orange's new coach, revealed he first became an assistant at the school five years ago when Mark Hodge was head coach and won a previous Crying Towel award presented annually to a Metro Conference coach by the West Orlando Optimist Club.

Dr. Phillips' Tom Carlsen told a teary-eyed tale about fixing the flat tire on a car belonging, apparently, to a Boone cheerleader, then learning it was really the car owned by Boone Coach Phil Ziglar, asleep in the back.

Ziglar said he had a special appreciation for his coaching peers for not running up the score against his beleaguered squad a year ago.

Even Winter Park Principal Bruce Suther got into the fray, in the absence of his coach, and suggested that unlike one of the schools that claimed to be large but slow, Winter Park was slow, but small.

Wonderful tall tales about Metro Conference football.

But when all the tears were shed, members of the Optimist Club presented its crying towel to Jones High's Ernie Swift who had the temerity to admit that ''Last year, we kicked a lot a people around, this year it's our turn to be kicked.''

Swift acknowledged his victory with a torment of tears and a plea to opposing coaches to go easy, perhaps playing Jones on Saturday so their teams could get tired from partying the night before.

Nine of 11 Metro Conference coaches participated in the Crying Towel contest which has been around as long as John Pitts, the now retired Evans High principal who is an active Optimist member. Only Winter Park's Gergley and Colonial's Bill Holt missed the festivities.